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Rachel Hurn
is an intern for The Millions. She was born in Los Angeles and is currently earning her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at The New School. Her work can be found at thenewyorker.com and at her blog, rachelhurn.blogspot.com. Follow Rachel on Twitter @rachelmariehurn.

A snarky take on Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze's Wild Things and a positively damning view of Wes Anderson's behavior during the filming of his forthcoming adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr. Fox, all available at Gawker.

“Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—T. S. Eliot is of this type.” President Obama wrote these words as a twenty-two-year-old student, but Edward Mendelsonargues that Obama’s words as a literary critic reveal his tendencies as a politician. Check out our own Michael Bourne’sreview of Barack Obama: The Story by David Maraniss, where Obama's letter was originally published.

Take a break from watching the snowboarding and skating at the Winter Olympics, and read some Russian literature instead. At NPR, Andrew D. Kaufmanrecommends three books to learn more about the Caucasus. For more on Russian literature, read our own Nick Moran'sessay on duels in Russian fiction.

On Twitter, Room author Emma Donoghue breaks the news that Brie Larsonwill star in the film adaptation of her 2010 novel, and that the script will be written by Donoghue herself. (Related: our own Edan Lepuckireviewed the novel soon after it first published.)

Is it just a kind of literary Stockholm Syndrome? This essay from Electric Literature explores why writing students idolize such horrible mentors. For more on what it means to be a mentor, here’s an essay from The Millions.

Over at The New Inquiry, Alison Kinney writes on narrative opportunity, the true function of the literary orphan, and the rage of the real orphan. This moving piece by Matthew Salesses for The Millions on adoption and searching for oneself in a strange place is a nice complement.